It’s open season on quangos, and Demos (a little tardily) has joined the hunt. Congratulations to the struggling think-tank for securing a slot on the Today programme this morning and a ream of publicity.
But to get attention you have to shout loudly. The cruder the message, the more John Humphrys salivates. Listeners will have been confused by Demos’s political identity – didn’t it used to be enthusiastically Blairite? – but even more puzzled by what the point is.
The new Demos pamphlet is breathless, and its authors hurtle into error. They say ‘since the mid-1980s there has been an explosion of central auditing bodies and reporting requirements – 800 quangos costing around £35bn a year’. Eight hundred auditing quangos? With an average budget of £43m?
Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary costs about £15m, HM Inspectorate of Probation costs £4m. The Audit Commission is bigger: our budget is £200m. But who are the rest?
It’s a double error. ‘Audit’ (what we do) is not what Ofsted or HMIC do. Audit means an examination of financial accounts. Lumping audit, inspection and generic regulation together is a recipe for misunderstanding and (if you are a genuine reformer) is a good way to miss the target.
The Demos authors style themselves ‘progressive Conservatives’. Both Ofsted and the Audit Commission were created by Conservative governments. Conservatism (it’s not necessarily a paradox) changes but it would have been enlightening to hear from Demos in what ways the Thatcher and Major governments were – their sense, not mine – ‘reactionary’.
Let’s get to the Demos argument. Trust the people, trust the frontline service deliverers. That’s a strong proposition. Why not dispense with outside regulation and supervision of local authorities altogether?
But Demos gets cold feet. We can’t, it turns out, entirely trust councils or even head teachers, let alone the directly elected police commissioners the authors sort-of support. The pamphlet tracks back. ‘These bodies carry out a critical function of ensuring that institutions perform and are held to account.’
Well, that’s a different approach and I don’t think I heard that endorsement aired on the Today programme. Next, ‘frontline professionals and citizens often see them as a valuable way of assessing how public services are doing and holding them accountable’.
I couldn’t have put that better myself. Parents and frontline service deliverers (the pamphlet says) back inspection. Confused? The authors want to believe that full local accountability could work; that citizens don’t need external assurance to get services that meet their expectations and willingness to pay. Why not markets: at best they can mobilise information? The authors’ logic leads inexorably to abandoning independent audit or inspection altogether.
But at this point, they seem to hesitate. They remember David Cameron and the exigencies of power, public trust and confidence, professional power, the limits to local self-government – which spending cuts could make more not less complex. They wonder if they’ve gone too far and run a risk of embarrassing the leader of the Opposition.
Perhaps we need audit and inspection after all. It’s at this point the authors suggest they don’t want to abolish quangos after all but create, instead, a mega-quango. A single giant to do all the inspection of schools, health care, police, probation, prisons, councils, job schemes, as well as ensuring public money is spent well and wisely not just by hundreds of councils but by Whitehall departments and agencies. But, don’t worry, it would be run on a shoe-string with a minimalist staff. David Cameron’s planning for office will, I’m sure, be a bit more realistic.
David Walker is managing director, communications and public reporting at the Audit Commission. These are his views
